HHLT Welcomes 5 New Trustees
At our Annual Meeting & Celebration on July 21, 2026, 5 new Trustees were voted in by HHLT’s membership. Please join us in welcoming these new Trustees, who bring a variety of backgrounds, interests, and experiences to our Board.
Jenny Baca grew up in Texas, with deep family roots in New Mexico. She spent her summers camping in the national and state parks across the Southwest, where she first smelled the deliciousness of a desert rainstorm, wondered at the star-filled sky, and developed a healthy fear of bears. She is a human geographer interested in the intersection of social (in)justice and the environment. For the past five years, she worked in environmental consulting, supporting the U.S. Agency for International Development’s global conservation and climate programming through research, stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, and organizational learning. In her past life as an academic, she lived off and on in Chile, researching the participation of the rural working class in the governance of Chile’s native forests during socialism, dictatorship, and democracy. From 2015 to 2017, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Bowdoin’s Latin American Studies and Environmental Studies programs, where she taught courses examining the relationship between people, power, and place. She is happy to be back in Maine and cannot believe that the beauty of Harpswell is less than ten minutes from her home in Brunswick.
Brooke Barnes is retired from more than 36 years of public and private experience in the field of environmental regulation. Brooke’s 15 years of professional experience at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection included extensive work in enforcement, policy development and implementation, licensing, rulemaking, leadership development, and organizational change. In addition to his regulatory experience, he served on the Governor’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Task Force, as Acting Chief Counsel to Governor King, and was a Leadership Instructor for the Maine Management Institute, building professional leaders and managers in state government. During his subsequent career as a private consultant in Topsham, Brooke offered Stantec clients practical expertise in evaluating critical permitting issues for their projects, developing permit applications, conducting negotiations with state and federal agencies, and assisting in expert witness testimony preparation. He was appointed to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection in 2026. Raised on a farm in Sebago, the garden is still his happy place. He works at Longfellows Greenhouses in the spring, in the summer months can sometimes be found washing dishes at a midcoast restaurant, in the fall visits his kids for a Colorado music festival, and in the winter enjoys skiing and snowshoeing.
Jamie Hark is a landscape architect, drone pilot and cartographer with a lifelong love for the coastal environment. He brings a background in environmental science, fine arts, and outdoor education to his many endeavors. His current work at Acorn Engineering focuses on adaptive landscape design for Maine coastal homeowners and municipalities in the context of climate change. He has led workshops in Harpswell and around the state on coastal erosion and hybrid shoreline stabilization techniques. Jamie is a member of Harpswell Conservation Commission and the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership’s Management Committee and is a hand-made map artist and drone photographer on the side. In his spare time, you’ll find him outside in all seasons with his wife and daughter, paddleboarding across Harpswell’s bays and exploring our town’s natural wonders. HHLT’s trails brought Jamie and his family to Harpswell, and he is excited to support the ongoing work of this vital community amenity.
Alicia Pulsifer Heyburn is a fifth-generation Harpswell landowner and is forever grateful that her father’s generation made an early decision to permanently conserve the Quahog Bay land binds the family together. Alicia holds an MS in Resource Management and Conservation and has built a career at the intersection of land stewardship, community engagement, and family decision-making. She has worked as staff or board member for organizations dedicated to access and caring for the outdoors, including Teens to Trails, Maine GearShare, the Maine Island Trail Association, and several local land trusts. Her work has ranged from community-based projects—like connecting coastal landowners with oyster growers and supporting fish passage restoration—to facilitating collaborative planning processes for families who share land and legacy. As founder of Maine Land Legacy, Alicia now advises Maine families on succession planning, conservation options, and the design of operating agreements that help families enjoy shared properties while avoiding divisive logistics.
A Harpswell native, Sven Pulsifer grew up exploring woods and coastal waters with an affinity to nature and curiosity to all of its parts. A childhood home surrounded by forest and heated with hand-split firewood led to a B.S. in Forest Ecosystem Science with a minor in Sustainable Agriculture. Travel, work, and volunteering stints with the Forest Service and on Italian farms broadened an interest in land management and the variability of conservation. Competing in timbersports while at college introduced him to arboriculture and a knot-filled profession that combines aesthetics, applied physics, and ecology. Along with running a tree care business he enjoys milling lumber, carving, hiking, foraging mushrooms, and bow hunting. Sven lives in Harpswell with his wife and adventurous daughter.